Android's Still a Formidable Foe to Apple

Last week, analysts began hedging their bets on Android's unstoppable adoption when Needham & Co's Charlie Wolf reported a slip in the platform's market share in the first quarter -- the first such loss since 2009's second quarter. Addressing a drop from 52.4% to 49.5%, Wolf credited Verizon's iPhone 4 as stemming the rise of Android's US market share and predicted the decline would continue come September when Apple's iPhone 5 debuts.

But worldwide, Android shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, according to a recent tweet by Google's senior vice president of mobile Andy Rubin, the platform is growing 4.4% week over week.

"There are now over 500,000 Android devices activated every day, and it's growing at 4.4% w/w," Rubin posted. That's an increase of 100,000 since Google's I/O convention in early May. To put that into greater perspective, activations hit 300,000 per day last December and was at a mere 100,000 per day in May 2010.

Despite the nearly 3% drop this quarter, and a potential dip in the fall, Android is likely to be the industry leader for the foreseeable future.